The time course of attentional bias in anxiety

Abstract

Attentional bias to emotional stimuli (especially unpleasantly valenced or threatening) is a common finding in anxiety and less commonly found in depression. So-called neutral or “nonemotional” stimuli varying in attentional processing demands have not been systematically investigated or contrasted with emotional stimuli. In order to clarify the specificity of early sensory attentional prioritization of emotionally arousing stimuli in anxiety, the present project collected event-related potentials (ERPs) during the emotion- and color-word Stroop tasks in both anxious and depressed participants. Present data show that emotional information is not always preferentially processed in anxiety and depression and that preferential processing may depend on the processing demands of neutral stimuli. Systematic examination of the role of emotional valence, emotional arousal, and neutral and emotional stimulus processing demands is crucial to understanding so-called “preferential” attention for emotional stimuli in anxiety, depression, and comorbidity. Such work can yield insights into cognition-emotion interactions in psychopathology that may improve understanding of the etiology and treatment of these disorders.